Erik Millstone from the University of Sussex joins the FRC for our Food Bites series and explores the current issues in the food system and what civil society organisations and academics could be doing to work towards solutions that address the issues within the food system.

Erik Millstone is a Professor of Science Policy at the University of Sussex. His expertise centre’s on the role of scientific expertise and evidence in the management of technological risks, especially those arising in the food chain.

Since 1974 he has been researching into the causes, consequences and regulation of technological change in the food and chemical industries. His work has been supported at different times by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, the European Commission, government departments and legislative institutions in the UK, USA, Germany, and several other EU Member States. His research has encompassed topics including: food additives, pesticides, BSE, GM crops, microbial risks and obesity.

From 2006 to 2016 he was joint leader of the ESRC-funded STEPS Centre’s work on Agriculture and Food Policy. He has participated in ten large-scale externally-funded research projects and successfully acted as principal investigator in three of them, including a 9-country EU-funded comparative study of policy responses to obesity. He has published over 40 papers in peer-reviewed journals and 11 books, the most relevant of which is BSE: risk, science and governance, with P van Zwanenberg, Oxford University Press, 2005.